The Helen Keller Moment

A work request: A personal essay about wine. Hmm. I like the idea--so many possibilities. The occasion on which I could not distinguish between a bottle of Trader Joe's famed Two Buck Chuck and a fine Brunello. The evening my cousin who has a hearing loss opened the most expensive bottle of wine I have ever owned when she was babysitting because she didn't hear me say "on the counter." The regrettable fruit wines from Vermont. No, I think I will go in a different direction.

For much of my adult life I was the person who passes the buck when it comes to choosing the wine. Not deferential by nature, when the wine list was presented, I always deferred. I knew enough to know, as they say, what I didn't know. Which was pretty much everything.

I knew so little, in fact, that I started to get confused about what I liked and didn't like. At a restaurant with friends, or when presented with choices at a bar, I would often go for the "I'll have what she's having" approach. Sometimes I would drink a glass of something, think to myself, "well, that's pretty good," then taste something else and realize the first glass was actually revolting.

And then there was the language. I just couldn't get a handle on it: the nose, the undertones, the quaff--I'm not even sure if that's actually a wine word, but it intimidates me nonetheless. When discerning companions spoke of "smoky notes" or the taste of cherries or pear or the "lingering finish" I smiled and nodded along, but I could tell my brow was furrowed. It was red or white, that I knew, but it was all wine to me.

Until I got married and went, for the first time, to Portugal on my honeymoon. I loved Portugal, the rocky winding roads that led to wild cliffs and hotels in convents looking over oceans. I loved hot, chaotic, also somehow sleepy Lisbon too, especially the food: the little custard-filled pastries redolent of nutmeg, the sharp and lingering sheep's milk cheeses, the barnacles and bacalhau, the sopa a lentejana--soup with garlic and a perfectly poached egg.

When eating, I am in familiar, effortless territory. I know what I like and what I want; I know what I am eating, how it was prepared, how to make it myself at home. In fact, I have no food insecurities; they are all reserved for the beverage portion of the meal. So as I ate my way through Portugal, when it was necessary, Ben chose what we drank, or a waiter or shopkeeper chose what we drank, and I chose the food, and it all went swimmingly if not groundbreakingly until our last lunch in Lisbon before returning home.

There are a number of restaurants in Lisbon that specialize in a Portuguese version of roast chicken. I had done some detective work to determine which was supposed to be the best of these, and we had decided to make that our final meal.

More tomorrow....